With all of the investments being made in SOA it is important to measure your progress and successes. An old quality management adage says you cannot improve what you don't measure. As a SOA consultant I often advise clients on how to measure SOA progress. A popular and effective analysis technique is to consider SOA in terms of a maturity model. The SOA maturity assessment I conduct considers SOA maturity in terms of technology, people and processes. For example, you can be mature in some processes, such as SOA design, and immature in others, such as operational SOA or service quality assurance. Also, the people perspective must consider not only IT capabilities across multiple disciplines but also collaboration and alignment with the business. The maturity assessment should also create an actionable plan - not just recommend you buy all the vendors products conducting the assessment. Your measurements should point out your strengths and weaknesses as well as gauge your ongoing improvements. It is important therefore to carefully consider your SOA measurements. Some SOA measurements should be posted similar to other common IT measurements such as projects within budget and on time, availability, and system response time. This helps to create a culture of SOA success by defining and measuring progress to goals for all to see. Some potential SOA measurements categories include: 1. ROI 2. Cost Savings 3. Discretionary vs. non-discretionary IT spending 4. Service reuse 5. Project demand 6. Project lifecycle timings (e.g. design vs. build) 7. Time to market 8. Business process improvement (e.g. costs, cycle times, KPIs) 9. Deprecated Interfaces 10. Performance to SLAs 11. Architecture effectiveness 12. Deprecated systems and interfaces 13. Quality It is important to start capturing SOA metrics early in the migration. For example, it is impossible to accurately calculate ROI without capturing costs from the beginning. However, don't get hung up on IT measurements to the point of delaying business benefits. The following highlights and links outline several SOA maturity models advocated by analysts and SOA vendors. The maturity model should assess where you are and then create ongoing improvement measurements to a defined goal. Note that some of these recommendations are aimed at selling products. <a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-simm/">IBM</a> SOA Maturity Model 1. Silo (data integration) 2. Integrated (application integration) 3. Componentized (functional integration) 4. Simple services (process integration) 5. Composite services (supply-chain integration) 6. Virtualized services ( virtual infrastructure) 7. Dynamically reconfigurable services (eco-system integration) <a href="http://www.sonicsoftware.com/solutions/service_oriented_architecture/soa_maturity_model/index.ssp">Sonic and partners</a> SOA Maturity Model 1. Initial services 2. Architected services 3. Business and collaborative services 4. Measured business services 5. Optimized business services <a href="http://www.integrationconsortium.org/docs/IMM/IMM2005%5b1%5d.pdf ">The Integration Consortium</a> SOA Maturity Model (see link for criteria) 1. Ad-hoc 2. Point-to-point 3. Defined 4. Managed 5. Services <a href="http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA0-4824ENW.pdf">HP SOA Maturity Model</a> (the link also outlines an assessment process) 1. Ad-hoc 2. Basic 3. Standardized Managed 4. Adaptive <a href="http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZTS-GI103"> ZapThink's SOA Maturity Model</a> / Roadmap (this is a nice chart) <!-- Site Meter --> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://s37.sitemeter.com/js/counter.js?site=s37eroch"> </script> <noscript> <a href="http://s37.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s37eroch" target="_top"> <img src="http://s37.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s37eroch" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/></a> </noscript> <!-- Copyright (c)2006 Site Meter -->